ITALY NOW
By RICHARD GOOLD-ADAMS
BENEATH his grey Alpini hat with its jaunty feather he now wore British battledress. His real name was Alessandro, but we called him Sandro and liked him. He had volunteered for the Italian army when Mussolini attacked the Greeks and later had fought against us in the Western Desert. But now he was an officer in one of the new Italian divisions which were formed last year to serve under Allied command in Italy against the Germans. These divisions were made up mainly from troops which happened to be in Southern Italy at the time of the armistice, and they were not, curiously enough, volunteers. Sandro had been wearing British uniform—with Italian badges of rank—for nearly twelve months, and he did, I know, respect us enormously ; most Italians do. But I asked him one day about Abyssinia. His pleasant, lean face puckered under bushy eyebrows, and I could sense the mental confusion of his position, holding firm as he still did to some of the ideas which he had acquired in the days when he was a keen young Fascist. It was a mixture of pride struggling against shame.
"You know, it is a pity," he said, "that we were driven out of Abyssinia. It was not necessary. We had done well there and would have done more. It provided the one outlet which Italy needs for her growing population. Italians used to migrate to the United States or South America, but those places are closed now, and it was essential for us to have a reasonable colony which we could develop. Why did we have to join Germany? Many Italians believe that if Italy had not sided with Hitler, Mussolini would have presided at the peace conference. Why should I as an individual now suffer for the rest of my life from the fact that I am an Italian, and my country went to war with you? We had no quarrel with you. You know, on the day that Mussolini declared war there were many in the villages of Italy, who, when they heard it, said 'Which side?' We are a people in whom there is more good than that. Why must we always suffer from the shame of it? Why should I have this curse on me?"
And it is in that ;nudclled frame of mind that many in Italy have travelled the bitter road of the last few years to their present desperate position. In Milan I saw some of them ; they were staging an enormous parade, a hunger march. In each corner of the Pia7.7a Duomo in front of the cathedral Allied Sherman tanks were drawn up, the covers off the muzzles of their guns and their crews ready for action. Above one of the tanks a Mussolini slogan was still dis- cernible on the wall of a building—" He who stops is lost "—an insight surely to the Gadarene character of his own last years. And I could not help thinking in comparison of the starkly utilitarian notices we have put up all over Italy: "Kill flies." "Keep clean." The whole square was packed with people ; but in a few minutes as I stood there part of the crowd formed itself into a moving column eight or ten persons wide. Placards and banners came up, and the head of the column led the way down the Via Quindici Aprile. And as they passed it was evident that representatives from every factory and trade group in Milan were present, men, women and children- wholet families marching together. "Give us food and work," ran the placards. "Away with the black market." "Where are the Government's promises?" "Down with the Capitalists." "Let the Liberation Committee control prices."
Their faces were quiet and grave, and thgre was no noise or shouting. They stared with interest, and indeed surprise, at the tanks whose glistening guns were trained on them. Thousands upon thousands of people came up the Corso Vittorio Emanuele and crossed the square that morning in a grimly orderly procession, but I could not help feeling that with the winter and a continuation of their hardships—as continuation there will inevitably be—these people would behave very differently to try and secure their rights. For they are confused, the people of Italy. It is true, of course, that the North has been relatively well off until recently. Under the Germans there was work, in spite of bomb-damage to many factories. And, because the Po plain is the richest part of Italy, there was food. Since the arrival of the Allies there has been less of both. The Pirelli rubber factories could, for instance, make enough tyres here and now to last the country-for several months, but stocks of coal are exhausted, and it may be a long time before any more become available. In the North, physical conditions are, none the less, a great deal better than in the South. In many parts there are even railways working ; while even now there are still none in the South, apart from exclusively military lines.
But psychologically a far shorter time has elapsed for Northern Italians to become accustomed to their positioh. When the Allies spread over the Po basin in a week, many considered them enemies quite as much as the Germans. The great success of the partisans —largely under Allied direction—only accentuated this. Much propaganda in favour of Russia also inevitably detracted from realisation of the power of the Anglo-Americans ; and purely Ger- man propaganda made and still leaves its mark. The Germans represented Southern Italy as being violently opposed to the "in- vaders," and it was with astonishment that people in North-West Italy saw our Italian troops in British battledress, with British vehicles and British guns, come swinging down the roads with the Anglo-American armies. And for all their dislike of the Fascist Republicans of Mussolini's latter days, Italian people of Piedmont did also tend to regard our British Italians as traitors, even though many had died in the cause among the spring flowers of the Apen- nines outside Rimini and Bologna last March and April.
The problem now is to start Italians thinking with real facts as basis for their thoughts. At the moment, in spite of the spate of newspapers, speeches and posters, probably not more than fifteen per cent. of the whole country is politically awake. The rest are either wrapped up in personal problems or afraid to declare themselves. In some districts gangs of young men go round at night and beat up their opponents or extort money from them literally at the point of the pistol—which quite often goes off. Of the six parties from which the present coalition government was selected the other day, not one knows how much support it really has, or can claim anything approaching a majority of the country behind it.
The new premier, Pain, who was the deputy chief of the Lombardy partisans, delivered a maiden speech over the radio, which was full of sense and much praised. He spoke home truths, and it needs a brave man to do this in Italy today. Among other facts, he pointed out that Russia could not and undoubtedly would not provide any of the three material things that Italy so desperately needs—transport, coal and food. If Italy behaves herself the Anglo-Americans possibly could and might. Parri knows indeed, as any Italian does if he really stops to think, that his country depends on outside help which must come from the West and not the East. Italians distrust each other so much that I have even heard them say, not once but many times, that the best thing for the country would be an Allied occupation—
meaning British—for ten years. In that way the Italians think they would get the things they cannot give themselves, fair, firm and settled government, eventual national unity—which they cynically.
blithely and no doubt correctly say would develop through their country gradually opposing itself to us more and more—and lastly those material goods without which the barren and rocky peninsula of Italy cannot live with forty-five million war-shattered people upon it.
Previous page
